Grady was a lifelong devoted member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. He was a charter member of the Eta Chapter of Chi Phi at the University of Georgia. In 1882 he was elected as the first Grand Alpha (National President) from the south after the union of the Northern and Southern Orders of Chi Phi in 1874.

In 1880, with borrowed money, Grady bought a one-fourth interest in the paper and began a nine-year career as one of Georgia's most celebrated journalists. On the business end, he quickly built the newspaper into the state's most influential, with a national circulation of 120,000.

In the tumultuous decades following Reconstruction, when hatreds lingered and conservative whites worked to re-establish white supremacy, Grady offered a vision of a New South in which the past was put to rest:

"There was a South of slavery and secession - that South is dead. There is now a South of union and freedom - that South, thank God, is living, breathing, and growing every hour," he said in an 1886 speech in New York.[citation needed]

Grady popularized an antithesis between the “old South” which “rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth,” and a “new south” – “thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity”.[citation needed] From 1882 to 1886, along with Nathaniel E. Harris, he promoted the creation in Atlanta of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a state vocational-education school to train workers for new industries.

Grady was also praised for his great passion for political oratory (he supported Prohibition and a Georgia veterans' home for disabled or elderly Confederate soldiers), commitment to the new peace, and well-known sense of humor.

That sense of humor and quick wit got Grady through more than one difficult situation. Once at a banquet of northern elites, he was waxing eloquent about the brilliant prospects for northern investments in a New South determined to rise from the ashes of defeat. Grady spotted General William T. Sherman in the audience, the celebrated Yankee soldier who was credited with defeating and burning much of Georgia, and particularly Atlanta, on his infamous march to the sea. Without missing a beat, Grady acknowledged the general by noting that the people of Georgia thought Sherman an able military man, "but a mite careless about fire."

In another speech, Grady wanted to gently chastise his Southern audience for what he believed to be Georgia's economic shortcomings. Rather than pounding them with statistics, he entertained them with stories that made the points. He said,

"I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. This funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor “one gallus” fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits and hit him at the other end about the knee—he didn’t believe in decollete clothes. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones."

Grady's prestige reached such a height that he became the only non-member ever to adjourn the Georgia Legislature. It occurred on the election of Grover Cleveland to the presidency. News of the close contest arrived at 11 a.m. during the Legislature's session. In his exuberance, Grady rushed to the Capitol with the announcement. He brushed past the door keeper and into the chamber shouting in senatorial tones, "Mr. Speaker, a message from the American people." Sensing the purpose of the intrusion, the Speaker offered Grady a place by his side. However, Grady strode up the aisle to the Speaker's desk, grabbed the Speaker's gavel, and cried out, "In the name of the American people, I declare this House adjourned in honor of the election of the first Democratic President in twenty-five years."

Grady's conception of the New South was based on the social supremacy of whites over blacks. Grady stated in 1888: "the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards, because the white race is the superior race... [This declaration] shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts".[2]

On December 12, 1889 he delivered a speech in Boston at Faneuil Hall, on "The Race Problem in the South." Grady was already ill, and the weather was terrible. His health worsened to the point that he barely made it back to the state of Georgia. By the time he made it to the depot at Atlanta, he was too exhausted to appreciate the reception prepared for him and had to be shielded from the crowd and escorted home by his physician.

By December 23, he was diagnosed with pneumonia and died that day. He was buried on Christmas Day 1889, first in a friend's crypt at Oakland Cemetery because of family finances. His body was moved and reinterred at Westview Cemetery when it opened soon after.